National Projects Aim to Reboot the Internet

iron-kurton wrote with a link to an AP story about a national initiative to scrap the internet and start over. You may remember our discussion last month about Stanford's Clean Slate Design project; this article details similar projects across the country, all with the federal government's blessing and all with the end goal of revamping our current networking system. From the article: "No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes. Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was 'generally healthy' because the current technology 'does not satisfy all needs.'"

Comments

My connection works just fine

[essence]

Is this one of those 'forced upgrade' things so hardware and software manufacturers can make a heap of money selling more stuff?

And get ready for a whole heap more IP claims and big corps attempting to own the internet.

Re:My connection works just fine

[TodMinuit]

It's worse than that: It's one of those research projects created to justify Ph.D's.

Re:My connection works just fine

[melikamp]

Well, duh. The way the Internet is right now, there is no way to incorporate or monopolize any particular aspect of it, and that makes some folks very fidgety.

One challenge in any reconstruction, though, will be balancing the interests of various constituencies. The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.

Yup, some "needs" are just impossible to meet with the Internet in its present state. Like the "need" for a single agency to monitor all Internet traffic. Or the "need" for some folks to control every physical traffic channel. Or the burning need of one familiar industry group to be able to decide unilaterally which computers are "trustworthy" enough to connect to the Web. As it stands, anyone can set up routers, anyone can lay cables and install WAPs, anyone can run a root DNS, an email server, a search portal, or simply host a universally accessible website, etc., etc... What a nightmarish world for a monopolist to live in.

Re:My connection works just fine

[Kamots]

Where's +1 scary when you need it :(

Re:My connection works just fine

[The_Wilschon]

Fair enough. Scrolling down the comments, I see a good half dozen highly rated comments that say more or less the same thing as you: Watch out for the corporate and national "security" interests. But here's a different, and perhaps more interesting question:

If they were redoing the internet from scratch, what is wrong with it that ought to be fixed? Can we hear some new-internet wishlists?

The first things I can think of, off the top of my head, are things that are already talked about fairly often: bigger address space (ipv6), and revision to SMTP to make it more difficult to spoof addresses and easier to catch spam.

Re:My connection works just fine

[melikamp]

If they were redoing the internet from scratch, [...]

But that's the point. Why would anyone want to rebuild it from scratch, to "reboot" it? I can make a long list of wishes that could improve the Internet, like higher speeds, universal access, better email service, more addresses, better DNS, and so on. And the beauty of the Internet is just this: we can implement any of these changes whenever we want and however quickly we need them. We can do these things in a coordinated manner, over a single month, everywhere in the world, or we can do them host by host, on an opt-in basis, over a period of ten years. There is not a single reason to scrape the whole thing, unless there is a fundamental problem with the design. And, sure enough, there is such a problem, and I've outlined it above: no single aspect of the Internet can be effectively monopolized.

RIAA, for example, can start their own DRM-net tomorrow, no one is holding a gun to their head. Microsoft can patch Vista to refuse connections to non-Vista computers. We'll see if that very secure design catches on. As others have noted, anyone can start using their own non-SMTP email server, either in isolation or with a bridge to the SMTP world. Anyone who wants a better Internet can just start with their own server or router and then spread the word (and people do that already with IPv6 and email, afaik). Anything more than that is an attempt by a single party to extract more value at everyone else's expense.

Re:Encompassing?

[TodMinuit]

As stated in the whitepaper:

Designed over 30 years ago, the success of the Internet is a testament to the foresight of
a handful of visionary researchers. Hundreds of millions of users rely on it for business
and pleasure; and it is now hard to imagine a world without it.

But our reliance on the Internet makes us victims of its success, and vulnerable to its
shortcomings. Some of the shortcomings are self-evident, such as the plague of security
breaches, spread of worms, and denial of service attacks. Even without attacks, service is
often not available due to failures in equipment or fragile routing protocols. And its
behavior is unpredictable making it unsuitable for time-critical applications. Other short-
comings are less obvious: The Internet was designed for computers in fixed locations, and
is ill-suited to support mobile end-hosts; it uses packet-switching making it hard to take
advantage of improvements in optical switching technology; it neither ensures anonymity,
nor facilitates accountability; and the demise and restructuring of most network service
providers suggests that providing network service is not profitable.

In summary, we dont believe that we can or should continue to rely on a network that is
often broken, frequently disconnected, unpredictable in its behavior, rampant with (and
unprotected from) malicious users, and probably not economically sustainable.

I think the last paragraph is disconnected with reality, but the second paragraph makes a good point or two.

This is a bad idea

[astrashe]

The Internet is basically fair, because when it was designed no one knew how insanely profitable and important it would be. At the time, no one cared about the net except the people who designed it, so they could do it honestly.

Any new design will inevitably be corrupted by the interests of large companies, and of governments who would feel the need to have their ability to spy on and control traffic protected.

Haven't we got something else we could spend $ on?

[BillGatesLoveChild]

What a huge waste of money. Sure they could build DRM and WGA and SonOfClipper in at the lowest level, but really, what's in it for the rest of us?

You never know. The guys raising money for this will beat the pr0nography and DRM drum enough that some politicians will be impressed and throw some of (your) money at it. But are they going to convince business and the public for massive retooling costs, when in the end, we'll have something very similar to what we have at the moment.

There are better uses for money. Try Cancer research or something else instead please.

Gradual transition

[suv4x4]

We're at a point where total reboot/scrapping of the Internet is as likely as waking up tommorow and finding all of IPv4 scrapped in favor of new shiny IPv6.

There's more loss in scrapping everything and starting over than it is to improve existing solutions in a compatible manner.

Another example: everybody knows the x86 instruction set and interface sucks. It so sucks, that for quite some time AMD and Intel don't produce x86 chips anymore. Have you felt any revolution or "scrapping" going on"? No because all modern chips will take the x86 instructions and translate them internally, so on the outside the chip works with x86 software.

This is how progress works: if something is used massively world-wide, and something sucks about it, expect slow gradual transition, where the offending problems will be tucked away in a compatibility, emulation, translation layer and earth keeps spinning.

A better idea...

[commisaro]

I think they should consider replacing the current series of tubes with something that more closely models a big truck. That way I wouldn't have to wait until next Thursday to get an internet from my office.

proper management

[falconwolf]

The current internet is working well, and with proper management it will continue to do so.

That't the problem. The powers that be don't want the internet to work as well as it does. Instead they want to control it.

Falcon